Reading:
“He that descended is the same also that ascended
far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things”
Ephesians 4:10.

We have been seeking already to see
that into that last clause of a parenthesis the Lord’s
servant has packed the mighty fulness of his apprehension
of Christ. We have tried to enter into the tremendous
emotion in which the apostle set himself to write this
circular letter. Having at last the opportunity to be
free from all his travellings and journeyings and
on-the-spot occupations with the affairs of the churches,
being now detached and shut up in his imprisonment, he
found it the occasion for which his heart had doubtless
often longed for giving expression, as far as he could,
to some of that mighty store of accumulated spiritual
knowledge of the Lord Jesus. And this letter is an
opening of those flood gates, a pouring out in
superlative upon superlative, beggaring all language to
find some way of expressing what Christ had become
revealed to him.

Here in this fragment, this mighty
fragment, there is a summing up of it all, a final vision
of that wonderful Lord: “That he might fill all
things” — his Lord Jesus at last filling all
things.

We have seen that this One, this
great “He” to whom the apostle refers, is the
subject of the whole Bible. We have traced the unveiling
of Him in the seven great stages of that unveiling from
eternity past, through time, to the ages of the ages, in
each stage the apostle seeing depths of meaning.

Well, now, we come from that wide
range, that vast scope, and seek to fasten down on one or
two particular emphases as we go on.

Firstly, quite clearly this phrase
is itself indicative of the greatness of the Lord Jesus:
“That He might fill all things.”
The final “all things”. It is impossible to get
outside of that! It is final: there is no more that can
be added. “All things” just means what it says
— everything. This eternal, divine determination and
design, which has been revealed to the apostle, is to be
that Christ does fill all things. It is the
predeterminate counsel of God that He shall. God hath, it
is said elsewhere, “appointed a day, in the which he
will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he
hath ordained” Acts 17:31. That is the Lord Jesus.
This phrase is therefore indicative of the greatness of
Christ.

How can one Person fill a universe,
fill all things? Well, it is not so difficult a question
to answer. You will not go to any part of this world, in
all its length and breadth, without finding traces of the
evil one. Wherever you go you will find that which
indicates and betrays that the evil one has been there.
Evil by the evil one fills this world, anywhere,
everywhere, and, we may say, in its natural condition he,
the evil one, the devil has filled all things. And,
although you do not see him in personal form, you know he
has been there, and very often you know that he is there.
He has filled this world with his evil self and his evil
marks and traits. They are everywhere. He has filled the
very atmosphere with himself. That is unchallengeable, I
think. You can meet that one anywhere, in anything in the
creation, which he has captured from Adam.

All right! Is that true? You meet
him in his nature, you meet him in his disposition, you
meet him in his evil atmosphere and presence.

And in exactly the same way Christ
is going to fill all things. That evil thing is going to
be purged out by eternal fire, completely purged out. No
trace of it will be left or found when God has done His
work in this creation, but there will not be a void. His
Christ is the One who is destined so to fill all things
that you may go anywhere in His created universe and know
Him by His footsteps, sense Him, feel Him,
recognise Him. But what a difference! What a
different atmosphere!

Now this present time in which we
live, though so poorly serving that purpose, is a time in
which just some little reflection of what is to be can be
found. It is a very blessed thing to be where Christ is.
It is a good atmosphere to be in when He is present and
He is filling all hearts. There is a behaviour, a
conduct, and a disposition that is so different when He
has His place in a company, in lives. We don’t have
too much of what is sometimes called “heaven on
earth”. There is a lot of room for more of that! But
we here know just a little, a very little, of this
changeover. The enemy is still present and about to
spoil, to mar everything, but if only the Lord has people
in whom He really has His lordship expressed, His place
fully given, it is a very blessed place to be in and
condition to enjoy. There is a little of it in this
world. Would there were more!

What I am saying is leading to
something else, of course. But here is the indication of
what the Lord intends, and one says that, dear friends,
because you will understand that we very much dislike
living in abstractions and visionariness, words,
beautiful ideas, and that sort of thing, that realm of
imagination. We must always have some practical ground on
which to build these great conceptions. And so, when we
speak about the time when He will fill all things
with Himself, in this way of character, of nature, of
disposition, of conduct and of behaviour, we must have
something upon which to put our feet down for the
present. And so it is that the great delight of Christian
hearts is found in that kind of fellowship and
relationship where Christ is everything. And it is a real
thing. It is possible to know that now, is it not? It is!

But I have said it is all too small.
It is not by any means in all things, but it is
the determinate counsel of God that so it shall be, that
He, the beloved Son, shall fill all things with Himself,
His own wonderful character, His divine character.

Now here is something that sounds
perhaps difficult to grasp and understand, but you notice
the context of this phrase. “He ascended, what is it
but that he also descended into the lower parts of the
earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended
far above all”. It was never necessary to
have the incarnation if God wanted to fill all things as
God, as deity. God could very well clear everything out
and just fill everything with Himself in sheer deity,
sheer Godhead. But this statement “He descended...
ascended... in order that He might fill all things”
indicates this: the incarnation. How did He descend?
Well, we know. By incarnation He came down in flesh, in
humanity — “taking the form of a servant...
being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself”
(Philippians 2:7,8). That was His descent — into
humanity, into the incarnation. Why? “That he
might fill all things” humanity-wise — in other
words, have people in whom and through whom He would fill
all things; have a race of human beings through whom He
will fill all things, who will be His fulness, and who
will minister and transmit His fulness.

Now, that is one of the great
arguments of this letter: “The church, which is...
the fulness of Him that filleth all in all”
(Ephesians 1:23). It is that the Lord should have people,
human beings, for the expression of His fulness in His
created universe: you and me. That is why He descended
first and then ascended — in order that He might
fill all things.

This great cycle of the deepest
descent to touch the heart and root and core of all the
trouble, down to its very depths, and His ascent far
above all was that there should be no realm left where He
is not its fulness. He did that through incarnation,
which itself means by way of human life, in order to have
human life like that.

Well, now, this is very great.
Indeed, it is the greatness of this One who is able to do
that. He must be very great!

But that leads us to this law, which
governs all spiritual history and experience. There is a
law governing all our spiritual history and experience.
It is not just something that is of its own free will
happening to us. It is under this law; it is controlled and
governed. The experience that we are having spiritually,
the history that is being made in our case, spiritually,
is held by this law, and the law is “That He might
fill all things”. If it is this matter of men, of
people, of humanity, of human life, then there must be
something in, behind and over what happens to us when we
get into God’s hands. And this is what it is: God is
taking us the way in which He is taking us with this one
object in view — that His Son, Jesus Christ, shall
fill all things.

But, you know, He cannot start from
zero with us, unfortunately. We are already so full! So
full of our own ideas, our own desires, our own
ambitions, our own interests and our own strength. Oh,
what a lot there is of which we are so full! And that is
just the trouble. That is where it began with Adam. Adam
made this great bid to have all the fulness in himself.
Well, the Lord let him have it, and Adam is more than one
person who lived so many centuries ago. Adam is a very
big, corporate person, who has filled the world and is
still making a bid to have everything in himself. He is
very full of himself. He is very full of his own
cleverness, ability, power, wisdom, and what not. And he
is filling himself more and more with his own fulness.

Well, let that be as it may with the
big Adam; but what about the little Adams that we are?
You and I? Well, we do not know, and we would not believe
it until the hand of the Lord comes upon us, just how
much there is of us in the picture. And when the Lord
begins to work upon us, we begin to discover there is a
lot more of us than we would ever have suspected or
acknowledged: indeed, this is an endless matter, a
bottomless pit. All the trouble is there — that
there is something in us that has got to be got rid of
and got out of the way. Is it true? Our simplest troubles
with the Lord are on that basis, and our biggest and our
most complex. So, if He is to fill all things with
Himself, there has got to be a history, a deep history of
making room for Him completely, by an utter emptying of
us, of everything that is not Christ.

It is not just negative. It
sometimes seems negative — emptying, undoing,
breaking, and all that, but this law is operating. It is
a law in nature. God put every tree in the garden into
the hands of Adam. It got cultivated, but it was not
necessary for there to be evil present in order that the
pruning knife should be used. That was a natural process.
To produce something better you have to get rid of
something that is not much good. To produce something
more you have to reduce a great deal. It is a law in
nature — you see it everywhere. Unto the better and
unto the more there is always a process of reduction,
what looks like destruction, but we know that in the long
run it is not destruction. It is construction,
fruitfulness. That law operates everywhere. And just as
God has written this law in the creation, so in spiritual
experience it is like that. God is working, dear friends,
with you and with me. On the one side emptying, breaking
down, cutting off, seeming to be reducing, emptying us of
that other fulness which is in His way and is not His
fulness, but always with this object — that there
should be more of Christ.

Now, perhaps some of you may say
“Well, there ought to be a very great deal of Christ
in me if that is the explanation, because I am having a
pretty bad time!” But here is where faith and
patience are called for, and, oh, you may take it as a
fixed law that any kind of work on God’s part which
has an emptying effect, an undoing effect, a weakening
effect where we in our self and self-life are concerned,
is determined by God to produce more of His Son. It is
the eternal law, and it is the law which is governing.

Now you can see that the Bible is a
record of this very thing. We have seen that Adam let in
all the trouble of this self-fulness, which is the curse
of humanity and is going to prove the utter undoing of
humanity. Do not make any mistake about it! We have
little indications of this almost weekly — that the
cleverness of man can be his undoing. What he calls his
wisdom and knowledge increasing can just be to his own
hurt. However, leave that as it may be — but Adam
opened this door and let in this accursed
self-sufficiency.

Whenever you find that God comes on
to the scene in relation to His end, His eternal end, and
puts His hand upon any man or any instrument, He takes
that instrument or that man through a history which for a
long time is a thoroughly undoing history. Who comes to
mind? Well, let us start with Abraham.

We have every evidence that Abraham,
or Abram, was a great man in Chaldea, a man of
considerable substance, standing, possessions and
sufficiency. Stephen tells us that “the God of glory
appeared unto our father Abraham” (Acts 7:2) —
and how did the God of glory begin to work? Well, He just
hooked him right out of Chaldea and brought him into a
place where all his own erstwhile fulness and sufficiency
was gradually removed. He did not give him a foothold in
that place. All he had was a tent — and moving from
place to place. No “continuing city”; a life of
utter dependence upon God. He was being emptied. Notice
the various stages of God’s dealings with him, right
up to the time of requiring him to offer his Isaac. Did
ever a man get nearer to the great heart of Calvary, in
the utter self-emptying, than when Abraham was asked to
give what to him was his all and his last, in Isaac? My,
this man was being emptied! Very well! But God appeared
unto him and then — “In multiplying I will
multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the
sand which is upon the sea shore” (Genesis 22:17).
Emptying — to vast fulness. That is spiritual
history. That is no mere teaching, truth. Ask Abraham
whether it is real!

Jacob: Jacob is elect, destined,
mark you, to build the tribes of Israel by his twelve
sons. Fulness is to come that way, tremendous fulness.
This seed of Abraham has got to come through this man
Jacob. All right! But Jacob, as we see him, is a man very
self-sufficient, full of his own cleverness and
artfulness. He can do it: he is sufficient for the
situation. And for the twenty years of his life with his
Uncle Laban that was the kind of life he was living,
tricking and triumphing by his own self-ingenuity,
cleverness and artfulness, all the time getting the
advantage himself simply because he could do it. Very
well — but what about Jacob and Peniel? The Lord, in
one of those theophanies of which we were speaking this
afternoon, met him there and said “Now, then, we are
going to settle this matter once and for all. I have
allowed you plenty of scope, plenty of rope, I have given
you all these years to extend yourself, but I have chosen
you for something better than that. Now the issue has
come. Tonight we settle this thing.” Jacob started
out again to try it on the Lord, and found he had
met his match, and more than his match, that night. That
story as told very often is put the wrong way: Jacob
wrestled with the angel. He never did until the angel
wrestled with him: “and there wrestled a man with
him” (Genesis 32:24). God took the initiative
in this matter. God took this thing into His own
hands. It was God who said: “We are going to settle
this mighty issue. Before you go back to that place of
covenant, of purpose, we are going to settle this thing.”
Who is master, Jacob or the Lord? Oh, what an emptying
that night! Not all at once, perhaps, for there are still
some traces of Jacob after that, but when at last you
meet him in the presence of Pharaoh, what a poor creature
he is! He talks to Pharaoh — “Few and evil have
been the days of the years of my life” (Genesis
47:9). Leaning upon his staff — he is a very empty
man, a very broken man. Now the Lord can do something:
out of that will come the purpose of God.

We just mention it. It is so patent,
isn’t it?

What about Joseph? Well, now, our
first introduction to Joseph: a good and nice young
fellow in many ways, the pet of his father and a lot
more, but... but... very conceited! Very indiscreet!
Telling his brothers about his dreams and implying “You
are going to be the ones who bow down to me”,
provoking the situation which was God’s sovereign
opportunity of starting up this work of emptying. A
dungeon is not much of a place to live in for thirteen
years! Being forgotten and enduring all the hardships and
difficulties of such a life, so that it is written:
“His soul entered into the iron” (Psalm 105:18
RV margin). Do you know anything about the iron entering
into your soul under the discipline of God’s hand?
Well, we need not enlarge. Here is this man indeed being
emptied of all his conceits, but at last, what fulness!
Fulness for Egypt and fulness for his own brethren, and
for the rest. It is the way.

What about Moses? Now, Moses was
learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. What a man
Moses was in the first forty years of his life! How full
of everything! So full that he thought he could do it. He
smote the Egyptian, challenged the Hebrew — he
thought he could do it. All right — he is
very full. Forty years at the back-side of a desert is
well calculated to empty you of that sort of thing! You
are not surprised that at the end of eighty years he
says: “I cannot. I am not able”. “Very
well,” says the Lord, “come then and I will
send you.” The same story — what an emptying
unto a filling!

We dare not dwell upon Israel as a
nation. With the Lord’s hand upon Israel, we pass to
David. One thing about the Lord’s dealing with David
is this — the working of this law of emptying,
humbling, and making him so utterly dependent in order to
bring him to the highest place of Israel’s fulness
in the Old Testament. There it is — and so it goes
on.

I have only taken out those
illustrations. The Lord is working by this law. He is
working towards this end — “that He might
fill all things”, but unto that how we have to be
emptied! What an emptying work He has to do! There is
nothing that stands in the Lord’s way more than
self-sufficiency. It is only another way of saying “pride”.
That stands in the Lord’s way, and when He has done
with us there will be no room or ground for any pride. No
more — it is down there as far as we are concerned.
But, oh! look at the end, the divine end! The increase of
Christ — “that He might fill all things.”

Now this we note as we close for the
present. This reversing of things from whatever fulness
there is in ourselves to make way for His fulness has to
have a crisis. As truly as the Lord met Jacob that night,
as truly as the Lord met Moses in a crisis, as truly as
the Lord met Saul of Tarsus in a very real crisis, there
has to be a crisis, there has to be a time and a place
where you and I come before the Lord on this matter of
self-life and Christ-life, and we say “This is
settled. So far as position is concerned, so far as
acceptance is concerned, so far as the foundation is
concerned, now it is settled, God helping me, once and
for all, that it is to be “no longer I, but Christ”
(Galatians 2:20) in anything. It is to be: “For to
me to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21). It is a
crisis. Everything does not happen in the crisis, but the
position is secured, the ground is taken, and it must be
so.

No doubt many of you know that. You
know there was a time, more or less extended — it
may have been a day, a night, or even a period — but
it was a time in your life when the crisis was raised as
to the self-life and the Christ-life, and it has to be
like that. From the crisis the process begins, the
process of the Christian life under the hand of the Lord,
which is just this all the way along — deeper and
ever deeper. If it is so, take heart! Let us try and take
all the comfort we can from it. Deeper and deeper is this
self-emptying to bring to the greater fulness of Christ
in us. It is a process going on. And, it seems to me,
both from the Word and from experience, that at the end
there won’t be much of us left! If the Lord is not
everything, God help us! That is what we are coming to.
It is going to be the Lord or nothing. He is working that
way, and when He works by that process, He intends it to
be according to His predeterminate counsel that “He
might fill all things”.

A crisis, a process, but, blessed be
God! a climax. The Word reveals in this very letter with
which we are occupied, that day, that glorious day of the
climax when it shall be “glory in the church... for
ever and ever” (Ephesians 3:21).

Now, if what we have said is true,
there is another thing that we ought to think about,
at least. It is this: that measure now is going to
determine the measure hereafter. What the Lord is doing
with us is not just an arbitrary thing. The Lord is
creating capacity for spiritual things. All the fulness
of what is spiritual lies ahead, in the hereafter, in the
ages of the ages. The measure in which that fulness is
expressed in us will be the measure of the capacity which
the Lord has been allowed to develop in us now. It
matters, you know. I don’t understand the New
Testament at all; it is a perfect enigma if what I am now
saying is not true. Why all this in the New Testament if
willy-nilly we are going to come into all the fulness? If
it does not matter at all about now, we are going to have
it if we belong to the Lord, we are going to have it all
if we are the Lord’s, why all this about “Whom
the Lord loveth he chasteneth” (Hebrews 12:6), and
all this about discipline and suffering? You see what a
situation that raises? It certainly says this most
powerfully — the measure in which the Lord gets His
way with us now is going to determine our measure in the
glory.

And none of you who knows anything
about the difficulty and suffering of the Christian life
fails to see that the Lord is seeking by painful means to
enlarge us. We start out with a very little spiritual
capacity for having, receiving, knowing, understanding
spiritual things. The Lord gets to work upon us —
and this stretching business is awfully difficult! The
Psalmist said, “In pressure hast thou enlarged me”
(Psalm 4:1 — Darby). Pressure unto enlargement is a
painful business, isn’t it? But the Lord is working
to increase our capacity. Thank God that is true!
Although it is so imperfect: we feel that we have not
made very much progress in this at best. Some of us can
see today, we can understand, we do know in an
intelligent way what at one time was altogether outside
of us, beyond us. We are learning, we are growing in
understanding, we are becoming more and more capable of
receiving the things of God. It is like that.

Well, that is the normal Christian
life. It is what the Lord is doing with us. This law of
Christ ultimately filling all things is governing our
spiritual history and our spiritual experience day by
day. What, then, is to be done where we are concerned?
Well, it is the old matter of applying our hearts very
definitely and earnestly to learn the lessons of our
sufferings, to learn the meaning of our trials and
adversities, to find out where more of Christ has to come
in by this breaking of ourselves. That is co-operation
with God toward His end. He descended, came right down
here, to take us in our humanity, and has ascended far
above all — and both things are governed by this
purposive statement in order “That He might fill all
things”.